


a new york city man

by M_Leigh



Series: SHIELD Founders Fandom Tumblr Fics [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, Origin Stories, blatant henry james ripoffs, fanfiction that is barely fanfiction anymore, howard stark microfandom, old new york
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-15
Updated: 2014-09-15
Packaged: 2018-02-17 10:47:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,956
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2306921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/M_Leigh/pseuds/M_Leigh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>He would ultimately die much richer than he had been born but he had, indeed, been born rich. If anything it was his father, the first of the notable Starks (as far as the public was concerned, although Billy Stark would not be remembered in the annals of history as his son and his grandson were), who was the true American success story; his father who had been a scrappy young man with nothing who had somehow turned that nothing into something and that something into more something and eventually all of that something into wealth.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	a new york city man

**Author's Note:**

> For [nimmieamee](http://archiveofourown.org/users/nimmieamee/pseuds/nimmieamee), who asked the relevant questions. Originally on tumblr [here](http://morgan-leigh.tumblr.com/post/97445639905/a-new-york-city-man).
> 
> A warning (such as it is) at the end.

No matter where Howard Stark found himself living, later in his life, be it the sun-soaked palm-treed coast of California or the dark grey interior rooms of the government in Washington or even the messy stretched-out reach of the U.S. Army in Europe, which was a place all its own, people could be counted on to say one thing about him: “Howard,” they said, or perhaps “Stark,” “is a New York City man.” They did not call him _a New Yorker_ ; this would have been, everyone wordlessly agreed, uncouth, and anyway he did not live there anymore and had not, at least after the war, lived there for some time. But there was no denying, ultimately, that he was A New York City Man.

Nobody said this to Howard himself. He would possibly have denied it, if they had, with a laugh—Howard, to his mind, was a citizen of the world, for everywhere in the world the principles of science could be counted on to function in the same manner, and everywhere in the world (that is to say, in his admittedly limited conception thereof) he could count on women to react to him in the same way. (“Women” in this case of course excluded one Peggy Carter, whom he unthinkingly considered as an individual creature not exactly outside of her sex but omitted from all of its stereotypes—but this is not, regrettably, a story about Peggy.)

But it was nevertheless undeniable that Howard was a New York man. He had all of the characteristics: he was loud, he was brash, and he walked very quickly from one place to another. He was exceedingly efficient in all things except when he chose not to be, in which case he was not efficient at all, which in fact was a considerable amount of the time. He possessed an innate charm that did not quite mask the fact that he was very straightforward about what he wanted and the fact that he wanted it. And most of all he possessed the innate belief that what he wanted to do and to achieve was possible and achievable and that it was in some sense owed to him. In this way he was perhaps not only a New York man but a very American man. He was the sort of American man other American men looked at and spoke to briefly at functions and wanted very, very badly to be, and of course some people hated him—who walks through life without being hated?—but he was very hard to hate, Howard. He possessed all these qualities in too perfect a balance to be hated by the masses. It was as though he himself were one of his own very finely calibrated machines, as long as you did not look inside of the machine, and see what was actually making it go, in which case you might have been very disillusioned with America indeed.

And of course there was also the fact that Howard had been born very rich.

He would ultimately die much richer than he had been born but he had, indeed, been born rich. If anything it was his father, the first of the notable Starks (as far as the public was concerned, although Billy Stark would not be remembered in the annals of history as his son and his grandson were), who was the true American success story; his father who had been a scrappy young man with nothing who had somehow turned that nothing into something and that something into more something and eventually all of that something into wealth. How exactly this had occurred remained something of a mystery to everybody but Billy himself. Billy, even more than Howard, was a New York City boy: he had grown up the youngest of five on the Lower East Side and knew every nook and cranny of the place by the time he was six, as they all had by around that age. They were the sort of children who did not often see their parents—work, exhaustion; more work, more exhaustion—and who instead had become a small colony unto themselves, a subsection of the larger tribe of errant lower Manhattan youths out to scrounge a penny here or a penny there or whatever they could snatch without anybody catching them.

Billy, unlike his older sister Catharine or his oldest brother Arthur, was a charmer, and had been since birth; nobody, it transpired, was capable of suspecting him of any wrongdoing whatsoever, which was ironic in light of the fact that it was he who was undeniably the most given to mischief of any of the five of them. This served him well later in life when he was busy turning nothing into something into something more—“What business exactly are you in again?” people would ask him, and he would demur; “Textiles,” he would say, or perhaps “Imports,” and leave it at that.

By the time, in any case, he made it onto the Scene near the turn of the century—auspicious, he felt, the turn of the century; the dawn of an entire new era of his life, an entire new era in the history of the Stark family, which up until then had no particular chronicled history to speak of, only bits and pieces of older generations’ stories that had managed to float down to the children (immigrants, immigrants, immigrants)—nobody had any idea quite what he did or where he had come from, but they all knew that they liked him enormously. There were of course the occasional curmudgeons who found him shifty and untrustworthy and _déclassé_ —all of this was true—but while that may have damned him in, perhaps, England, in New York nobody cared, or perhaps more accurately if they cared they cared more about the fact that he was charming and well-spoken and very, very good-looking. (The only people who raised any grumbling objections to his presence were, unsurprisingly, men.) And anyway Billy Stark did not pose any kind of serious threat, for if their wives and daughters flirted with him they surely would not marry him. The prospect was inconceivable.

Men, it is known, can rarely conceive of a woman’s heart; had they consulted their wives, or daughters, they would perhaps have been less surprised when the news came down from Boston in the spring of 1914 that Billy Stark was marrying one Moira Esther Hughes. “I don’t believe it!” the men of New York could be heard saying in parlors and bedrooms, dining rooms and social clubs. “I suppose it was only a matter of time,” their wives replied, while their daughters sighed wistfully to themselves, thinking of Billy Stark’s thick dark hair, which he had occasionally been known to let them touch in dark hallways behind parlors and ballrooms and dining rooms, anywhere Society was gathered—let them run their fingers through it, giggling, quite gallantly really. And he had never once been caught.

If Billy Stark was a New York boy then Moira Esther Hughes was a New England girl, no ifs, ands, or buts. She had been raised in Boston and had spent her summers in Newport and had been given the most formal education a girl could ask for. She was very quiet and very well-behaved and in all ways as far from Billy Stark as it was possible to be, which was in all likelihood why he liked her, and why she found herself so violently in love with him, although to be fair the single strongest determining factor in her sudden headfirst fall into first love was no doubt a subliminal but profound desire to escape the suffocating atmosphere in which she had been raised. Certainly nobody else whom she had met at any of the soirees and formal dinners thrown by her parents and her parents’ friends and contemporaries had featured anybody like Billy Stark, in town on business—what business, again, it was impossible to say—who spent dinner telling rambling anecdotes that had half the room hanging on his every word and the other half leaning back from him as though repulsed, watching her, or so she thought, with particular attention.

Her suspicions were borne out the next day when he called on her and continued in his rambling charismatic vein, much to the immense disapproval of her father’s spinster cousin, who lived with them in order to shepherd Moira through the dangerous world of men without ever—heaven forefend—having to be alone with any of them. (Moira was also rarely alone with other girls. She was, frankly, rarely alone at all.) Fortunately Aunt Judith was also much too bound by the strictures of propriety to dare speak more than a few words in front of Men, particularly such Men as Billy Stark, which left him largely unimpeded. And so Moira found herself, over the course of a very short span of time, in love.

It would be easy to attribute unseemly motives to Billy in his pursuit of Miss Hughes—most people, in fact, did. It was true that her social status (considerably higher than his own, as a New England Girl, who had been raised in Boston, and summered in Newport) was substantially higher than his own, and also true that Billy—always shrewd, always seeing everything from every possible angle—was not unaware of this, nor unappreciative of it. But he did not need her money: he had money of his own. And it was this that everybody whispered about viciously, behind their backs: her money, her money, her money. For Americans, after all, are primarily concerned with money, above all other things. It did not occur to the sort of people that Moira Esther Hughes knew, and Billy Stark had come to know, that although Moira’s money was old and Billy’s money was new, it was all equal in value. Billy pursued Moira because she interested him, and he liked her, and because—admittedly—she had been a challenge, though that is not so very unusual, is it not? And yet he did not feel the same burning passion in his veins for her that she did for him. Later she would think that he had misled her but this was also not the case. He felt about her exactly as he thought a man should feel for his wife, which was all he had the capacity to feel for a woman. It was not his fault, he believed, that she seemed to have expected something else.

And so they were married, Billy Stark and Moira Esther Hughes—William Stark, her family called him, in a largely futile attempt to make the shame of the one child of the younger generation marrying such an unsuitable man—in Boston, and then Moira—now Moira Esther Stark—moved down to New York, to a very handsome brownstone in Gramercy that Billy had bought with the proceeds of Whatever It Was He Did. “Well,” the men of New York said, in their parlors, and their bedrooms, and at their dining room tables. “I never thought I’d see the day.”

“Neither did I,” their daughters said morosely, picking at their meals with their sterling silver forks.

For obvious reasons a European tour was out of the question, and in any event Billy was not a man interested in Europe: he was an American, deep in his bones and his blood, and so they toured America, Virginia and Georgia and Dallas before the railroad snaked over to Arizona—and there the Grand Canyon, Moira attempting to clutch at her skirts and her hat and her parasol all at once while Billy peered eagerly over the edge, and dust blew in her face. It transpired that Moira was not very cut out for America, even though she too was an American: she would probably have done better living in Europe than in most of the rest of her country, and yet on they traveled, to San Diego and Los Angeles and San Francisco, Billy traipsing happily up and down the hilly streets and pointing out architectural oddities and staring in awe at the bay (where some time later there would be an even more impressive bridge) while she panted behind him and eventually insisted that they take a carriage, and then up to Seattle and back to Chicago and finally, finally to New York.

By the time they returned to the city Billy was perhaps more invigorated than he had ever been in his life, barring his early thieving years, when adrenaline had generally speaking been an effective replacement for hunger, and Moira was more haggard. He did not seem to notice, and instead got back to the business of making something out of nothing, which he did with great efficacy and panache. Moira occupied herself with the house on Gramercy Park, though “occupied” is perhaps not the right word—they had mostly employed another woman to decorate it, and though she had put some touches on it herself she mostly felt intimidated by the furniture, the servants, the paintings hanging on the walls. They were not nicer than what she was used to but she did not want to disturb anything. And so she mostly sat in the window and looked out at the park, and occasionally ventured into it, and watched the squirrels, and the children, and sometimes managed to read a book.

Everyone thought it was peculiar that their first child did not come until 1917, three whole years after they were married, though this was not for the reasons that everyone suspected (which the reader can surely conclude for herself). Moira, it seemed, was simply not given to pregnancies. And yet along one came, much to her excitement—though that, too, is perhaps not the word. Billy, certainly, was excited. He liked children, liked the idea of children—he had been such an emphatic child himself, and in many ways had not really ever grown up. But Moira was—you could perhaps say fixated, on her pregnancy. She sat in the window overlooking the park and held her hands over her belly as it grew and grew and she looked down at it, at the place where her child was growing, and she thought _please please please be all right, please come out all right, please_ , and she prayed fervently that it would be a girl, which was really all that she had ever wanted, and she waited, and she waited, and her mother and her Aunt Judith and everyone who knew her (which in New York was not many people) were worried that something would happen, because she was small, and thin, and did not look capable of delivering a child without some complication.

Everyone worried, that is, except Billy, who was sure that everything was all right—so sure that it did not even occur to him that he should be concerned. This did nothing to endear him to Mr. and Mrs. Hughes, who already hated him, but he hardly noticed, so it was hard to say whether or not it mattered.

But in the end it was Billy who was right: for Howard Stark came out into the world with no difficulty at all, except the routine difficulty that presents itself in any labor, several hours after his mother’s water broke, and started screaming up an unbelievable storm the second he got his first breath of air into his lungs.

Howard Stark was a blessed child from his first moments in the world, everyone agreed. He contracted none of the diseases typical of children of that time, and he gained weight at the correct rate. He was unremittingly cheerful. His development was advanced in every respect but not so advanced that it alarmed his parents and caretakers. His father found him singularly delightful, a sentiment his son, as a gurgling baby being bounced on his father’s knee, gleefully returned. But Billy did not actually spend much time at home with Howard and Moira, and so it was Moira who spent more of her time with Howard, and the paternal rapport that was so manifestly in evidence between father and son was sorely lacking between mother and child. It was impossible to say just why this was so; there was not, truth be told, any single concrete reason. Moira had wanted a daughter and had instead received a son who looked more and more like her husband the older he grew, a son who gazed up at her with unnervingly bright, knowing eyes—who seemed to know things about her that even she did not, just by looking. How was one to raise a child like that? She had met plenty of babies in her time and never any baby like her own. Perhaps this was simply a consequence of the new century. Everything, it seemed, was changing so quickly. She could not keep up. She did not really want to.

But little boys grow up whether their mothers like it or not, and so Howard Stark rushed along forward, from lying on his back to standing on his own two legs and then to pulling himself about the house by hanging onto furniture and the walls, looking around hopefully for some interesting contraption, or, even better, an abandoned scrap of food. (Later, these priorities would be reversed.) And soon enough he would be able to walk around all by himself, a development that correlated directly with a distinct depreciation in the quality of life of all other members of the household, except of course his father, who was so rarely present that it hardly mattered. The house, finally, was Howard’s full and total domain. For so long—it seemed to him—he had been curtailed by his frustrating inability to _move_ properly, relegated to watching all sorts of interesting things happening from his place on the floor or clinging to the table or the wall—but now! Now he could go _anywhere_. It was _marvelous_.

The imagination that would one day make Howard Stark one of the foremost American innovators manifested at this early age much the same as in most other children: though his interest in machines and gadgets and electricity and all sorts of similar such things would develop early, in the very earliest years of his life he told himself stories, cast himself in muddled but elaborate tapestries of intrigue that he imagined were all transpiring within his house, some of which were in fact coming to pass. He was fascinated by the mice in the walls (even the very wealthiest New Yorkers cannot escape mice); he was fascinated by everything the servants in the kitchen said, even if he did not understand most of it; he was fascinated by the rooms that were mostly out of use but still had to be cleaned regularly. He imagined himself not as a knight or a prince (too English) but as an explorer, investigating some mysterious foreign land, populated apparently by dusty chaise longues, side tables, and paintings after the Hudson River School.

But mostly, by the time he was old enough to think about these things, he considered himself an investigator in the subject of his mother: his greatest mystery, his most uncrackable enigma. Howard spoke often enough to his mother but even more often played a game with himself (though he would not have thought of it this way) in which he attempted to watch her for as long as possible without being noticed, gathering Information. Evidence, even, though evidence about and for what was a muddled matter of little importance. His mother rarely did anything of much interest: she sat at the window, looking out at the park—the park! Howard’s greatest paradise! how he loved it!—and sometimes she read books and sometimes she wrote letters. And sometimes she had friends come over, and it was then that the game became particularly challenging, because then there would be two pairs of eyes, instead of one just staring off into space. But of course a visit from a friend was much more interesting than letter-writing or reading. And so he would be particularly motivated.

So it was that Howard came to know that his mother was not very happy, and that she wanted another baby, and that his father “carries on as he does, you know,” and that she would rather have lived in Boston, all pieces of information that he could not consciously process in any way at the tender age of three, or four. They of course made it into his psyche somehow nevertheless, but if you had asked him at that time to explain them or their significance he would not possibly have been able to do so. His game was not about doing anything with the information he gathered: it was about gathering it. And so he carried on, and on, and on.

Billy Stark, meanwhile, was carrying on in his own particular way, with one of the maids, and then the other, and then another maid at a hotel in Washington, and a society lady he knew who was married and had found she did not care for marriage, and with several young eligible girls who, if they had been foolish enough to tell anybody about what had occurred, would not have been so eligible anymore. Fortunately for Billy he was very good at picking the right girls to proposition: the girls who would not say anything, even when he did not, as they secretly hoped, somehow dispose of his dreadfully boring wife and run away with them instead. (Later Howard would also inherit this tendency, as would his son; the Stark line, it would seem, was strong.) He remained somewhat baffled by his wife’s displeasure at this state of affairs, which says very much about him indeed. But there was little to be done: they were stuck with each other.

So Billy did not come home much, and Moira did not do much but wish she were elsewhere, and Howard wandered from room to room like a very small ghost. “It’s no good, the way that boy’s being raised,” the cook said at least once a week, shaking her head; “How’s he being raised, exactly?” the housekeeper would generally reply, and everybody would chuckle appreciatively, if sourly, under their breaths.

But when Howard was four years old a miraculous thing occurred: his mother became pregnant again. Contrary to becoming worried about the presence of another sibling in the home, Howard was delighted by this development—after all, it was hardly as though his mother could bestow less attention upon him than she already did, and in fact she seemed to become brighter, more alive, with her pregnancy. To the adults around her she seemed slightly manic, slightly frenzied, but Howard was four and could not distinguish between this and simple happiness: besides, she was talking to him, telling him all about the baby, how big it would be now (she had no idea, and was guessing, but Howard took her word as gospel truth), and how much longer it would be until it came out and he had a sibling, a brother or a sister.

He liked this idea: he liked the idea of a sister particularly, because he would be able to boss around a girl more easily than a boy, and also as a brother to a sister would have certain important protective duties that made him feel preemptively important. Besides, even at four, and even as a result of the brief tangential interactions that were relegated mostly to the park, Howard already knew that he liked girls. This had not yet mutated into his father’s kind of liking girls: Howard, at four, just _liked_ them. Even if he did also think he would want to boss his sister around. Girls were funny and weird and provoking them was immensely satisfying. So he hoped it was a girl, and when he sat with his ear pressed to his mother’s belly (another thing that fascinated him—for how did it _work_? how did any of it _happen_?) he imagined a little girl sitting inside, waiting impatiently to just be let _out_ already. This, he thought, was how he would feel if relegated to such a small space. It would be maddening.

When the day came, it came earlier than expected, and Howard was sitting in the parlor all by himself with a set of toy soldiers directing a particularly elaborate battle when he heard the commotion begin. He poked his head out the door and saw Cook and Malley (his name for the housekeeper, who was in fact named O’Malley) rushing by, and when he started to say something Malley stopped and said, “Howard, you’re to stay in that room and _not come out until one of us says so_. D’you understand me?”

“Okay,” said Howard, and she closed the door in his face.

He did try: he _did_ try. He rocked back and forth and stared at his toy soldiers (very dull, now; very unengaging) and pressed his ear to the door to try to hear anything. At some point someone came in the door and walked up the stairs. He assumed that was the doctor. And after a while he could hear his mother making weird sort of not-quite shouting noises, which was alarming, but more than alarm he was feeling _aggravated_ that he was being kept _alone_ in the _parlor_ while everybody else was up there, where his sister was going to be appearing at any moment. That was sure to be a very special moment, he felt, and he was more excited about it than _anybody_ because then he would have a natural ally, like one of his toy soldiers, somebody on his side no matter what—it was very important, and he was being kept down here, and it wasn’t _fair_.

Howard hated unfairness, mostly when it was being applied to him.

He danced from one foot to the other, looking very much like a child who needs badly to go to the bathroom, although he did not. He needed badly to leave the room and go upstairs. His mother kept on making the weird sounds and what if his sister was born and then there was some—special _baby_ thing that they did where only his mother got to see her for weeks and weeks and then he missed his chance? What if? What if all of that happened and everything was ruined? It was his only choice, really, to open the door, and go investigate. Wasn’t it? He wobbled between his feet.

The sounds from upstairs stopped. Howard also stopped wobbling.

He pushed open the door, which creaked slightly, and peered up the stairs. He could not hear a sound. Very, very carefully, he started to crawl up the steps, on his hands and his feet, so quietly that surely nobody would be able to hear him, and then once he got up there, he hid against the wall—he was very good at spying by now—until he got to the door, and peered in.

His mother was lying on her back, staring at the ceiling. The doctor was standing several feet away from the bed with his hands on his hips. His hands were very bloody and were leaving bloody marks on his white apron. Cook was not in the room but Malley was and both of the maids, and they all had handkerchiefs over their mouths. One of the maids—Sarah—was crying. His mother was not crying. He had never seen his mother cry.

He could not see the baby. Where was the baby?

His mother raised one of her arms and covered her face with one hand but she was still not crying; he could tell. And then he knew somehow that the baby had not been born. Or—not been born right. That was it. The baby had not been born right.

Malley looked over and saw him.

“Oh,” she said, and that was all, before she came out of the room and closed the door behind her, and picked him up right off the floor, even though nobody did that anymore (although he was still quite a small boy) and carried him all the way downstairs to the kitchen without saying anything at all, even though he had been spying and should have gotten a talking to.

So they both sat with Cook and ate sweet cake and didn’t say anything, and Howard thought about the blood on the doctor’s apron, and kicked his feet against the legs of the chair.

And so it came to pass that Moira Esther Stark _née_ Hughes would never be able to have another child, and shrunk further and further into herself, a small white thin ghost-person, who thought more about her dead girl child than the one she had who was living. And Billy Stark, whose sister Catharine and brother Arthur had died before they reached twenty, and whose sister Louise was living in Queens somewhere with a dentist—for this, after all, was America—would continue to philander, and the sort of people that he had always known and Moira never had would eventually start to move into the area around Gramercy, and they would move—up, up, up the East Side, and time would pass, and they would all get older. It was, all things considered, not a terribly unusual story: in fact, it was predictable. But the thing that it produced—that is, Howard—was singular. For after all: this was America.

**Author's Note:**

> Warning: a woman gives birth to a stillborn baby.
> 
> You can find me on tumblr [here](http://morgan-leigh.tumblr.com/).


End file.
